What are we trying to do?
We want to find out why people with mental health problems usually have different health behaviours. We also want to find out ways to promote healthy behaviours for people with poor mental health.

 

Why is this important?
People with poor mental health usually exhibit less healthy behaviours, such as low physical activity. This can lead to worse physical health for these people. However, there is limited evidence for why poor mental health predicts worse health behaviours, or ways to mitigate this.

 

How are we doing it?
We are using information about mental health from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, which is completed by over 20,000 individuals. We separate mental health into specific symptoms, such as low energy, and analyse which symptom of poor mental health is the biggest contributing factor for differences in health behaviours.

We then use information about people’s living environment, such as the number of alcohol venues and access to parks, to understand whether creating healthy living environments can help to improve health behaviours for people with poor mental health.

 

Findings
We expect findings to become available by the end of 2026.

 

 

More information

 

 

Senior Programme Lead
Mike Spence
michael.spence@manchester.ac.uk